By Tim Hepher, Allison Lampert and David Shepardson
FARNBOROUGH, England (Reuters) – Germany’s Lilium Jet has a queue of young engineers and students waiting to board thanks to the interest of a five-year-old boy.
The futuristic flying taxi is one of many high-tech projects on display as the Farnborough Airshow turns its attention to the aerospace industry’s pressing recruitment problem.
“We had no intention of opening the cabin today but a five-year-old boy came up and said ‘this thing takes off vertically and why can’t I get on board’ and we’ve had a queue of visitors ever since,” said head of talent acquisition Alex Jordan.
For this young man, a job in aviation remains a distant dream, but the industry is eager for qualified recruits to meet demand.
“Aerospace is always the big frontier… you see things flying and you want to work on them,” said Jeet Makadia, 27, a recent engineering graduate working on a project at Rolls-Royce.
Visitors to the show, which ended Friday, won’t immediately solve the aerospace industry’s problem of replacing workers lost during the pandemic, but the threat posed by labor shortages to current production and future growth plans casts a long shadow over the show.
“There are very few people studying aerospace, so there is a shortage of personnel,” said Tushar Subhash Dhulasawant, 26, a recent engineering graduate interested in control systems and unmanned aerial vehicle design.
The aerospace industry’s pitch to potential recruits includes visionary ambitions such as space projects that few other industries can match.
But aerospace giants like Boeing and Airbus face competition from agile sectors like artificial intelligence, which implement many of the same engineering skills.
“You have to assume they’re going to do something different” and not stay on the same mission indefinitely, said Paula Hartley, a senior defense executive at Lockheed Martin.
HQW Precision UK in Plymouth, England, supplies super-precision ball bearings for items such as starter generators for aircraft, steering fins for missiles or satellites in space.
The 75-year-old company, formerly known as Barden, is moving to supply not just components but also pre-assembled systems that can be snapped into place and sold for a higher value.
But the “secret sauce” for highly specialized design work is the availability of application engineers, a sought-after niche of engineers who translate customer needs into specific products, said Mark Wakeham, business development manager.
“In order to be able to make progress in this area, which is absolutely necessary, we just need more and more engineers in the future project,” he told Reuters.
STEM EDUCATION
The company is not alone. The mismatch between supply and demand for jobs is imposing a huge cost on the sector.
If the aerospace industry were a country, it would have unemployment of 4.4%, according to McKinsey (roughly the level economists consider full employment), which drives up wages.
According to the same data, a lack of talent in the aerospace industry could cost an average-sized aerospace company between $300 and $330 million in lost productivity each year.
Recruiters say the answer to the industry’s staffing problem starts in schools, but won’t offer an immediate solution.
“It’s not just about promoting the women we have (and) hiring more women… but also making sure that more women enter the system at the entry level with education,” said Arjan Meijer, CEO of Embraer Commercial Aviation in Brazil.
He and other executives acknowledged that the male-dominated industry had yet to meet its diversity goals.
Last month, education ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized countries expressed concern about access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, especially for girls and marginalized groups.
“It’s about getting it out there, especially to girls and young women,” said Kirsten McGuire, who promotes STEM in schools with British education charity SATRO, at an educational area at the fair designed to capture the attention of young visitors.
There have also been concerns that aviation’s record on greenhouse gas emissions could deter young people entering the sector. The industry has pledged to cut emissions to net-zero by 2050, but has faced controversy over alleged greenwashing in northern Europe.
At the Lilium stand, the pioneers of tomorrow seemed unfazed.
“I don’t think I’ll be discouraged. Almost all companies here are concerned about emissions, so probably when I become an engineer there will be plenty of engines I can use in my designs,” said Vincent Liao, 13.
Asked what problem he would most like to solve, he said: “Probably something to do with emissions, a new concept… maybe an idea that no one has thought of to save as much fuel as possible.”
(Additional reporting by Joanna Plucinska and Abhijith Ganapavaram; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)